Extraordinary discoveries from unassuming lives
IT’S the stuff of the Greek Myths. A group of initiates tend the Oracle. Every day they feed it with new information, pruning and caring, enabling it to grow to a monstrous size.
These are the keepers of public access; welcoming people to the monster’s lair. Visitors add more fuel to the sacred fire, then leave having discovered some secrets of their past, perhaps, their connections to others in the world.
Other days it’s more like doing a colossal jigsaw puzzle, which you’re sure you’ll never finish, however you can see a pattern beginning to emerge. Visitors invariably find some part which relates to them, they correct mistakes, provide new assistance and add a piece more.
Since January 22, 2012, the volunteers of our Genealogy Project have been making a record of ‘everyone who ever lived in Newbiggin by the Sea’ aiming to make this ‘freely available, to everyone, forever.’
Some might consider this an eccentric task. While this may be true, I’ve never doubted whether we should keep at it. Not least for that visceral engagement with those whom you’ve helped to discover family, identity, confirmation.
A community to which they ‘belong,’ from wherever they live in the world.
Such moments bring new understanding and help find something deep in our humanity. As we began the great project we had already recorded 787 names, some our own. As I write, our historic record now extends to 39,485 people. We believe that we have created the biggest ‘community family tree’ in the world.
That’s a big claim for a little place where the population has rarely exceeded 10,000 and is now much less. However, the Newbiggin Community tree records the names of individuals back to 1200, with linked families dating from 1600.
Families are highly interconnected with each other across the complex inter relationship sofa fishing community isolated for centuries, mixed with huge coal mining families of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
A majority of the people recorded in the Community Treewww. new big gin by these a community tree can trace those relationships back 12-15 generations across families now spread out over the whole world.
This isn’t just a dry list of names. The global company which now hosts us for free, enables us to collect individual files of information, photographs, documents, the stories of thousands of lives on an epic scale.
All this has already inspired more than 100 community meetings, ten books, a musical, seven exhibitions, community information boards and our Family History Centre open several days a week.
Come and visit us at 82 Front Street, Newbiggin by the Sea NE64 6QD. Everyone is welcome and we are always seeking new volunteers to join in.
This summer we’ll present our new ‘Bay on the World’ exhibition, with talks and walks set in the historic landscape of Newbiggin by the Sea. All our work for the next three years is building towards a ‘Grand Homecoming’ for those from far away who still count Newbiggin as home.
We’re planning a 400th anniversary celebration of the 1627 wedding of Robert Robinson and Katharine Milburne, great grandparents of thousands.
Hopefully, one of our 6th cousins, the granddaughter of Newbiggin’s most famous son, will be able to join us from Hollywood.
Even so, this is a project which extols all of us ordinary people, of whom you’ve never heard. Everybody has a story to tell and when you take the time to look, you can find the whole world in lives once overlooked, which now we’re making plain.
‘Building history from the grass roots’ means that you’re able to see the impact of global events such as world wars through the lives of people in one community.
Pooling evidence from our own family histories in one place develops historic understanding. It recovers information about the fishing disasters, the coming of the coal mine, the immigration and emigration which have marked the village over the passage of centuries. Learning through the lives of people who lived and worked together, walking the same streets, sharing some of our genes, builds empathy with the lived experience of people now long gone.
Developing this extraordinary project, contributed to by so many, has been a profound learning experience, providing comfort in connectedness. Making some extraordinary discoveries, sometimes from the most unassuming lives, it helps build confidence and hope for the future.
In discovering the lives of people who have been part of great, almost forgotten events this work encourages respect for the ordinary people of the past. It emphasises the quality of every human being, the significance of democracy and the change from which we could all benefit, were such people to ever be empowered.
Any community can do this; every community could produce a story so different, so extraordinarily its own, yet comparable – and connected.
Over the course of 2024, starting tomorrow, I’ve been invited to speak to a number of local history and community groups around Northumberland and Newcastle.
I’ll enjoy blathering on about the Newbiggin by the Sea Genealogy Project, I’ll also be challenging each one of them to do one of their own, and do much better.
“This summer we’ll present our new ‘Bay on the World’ exhibition, with talks and walks set in the historic landscape of Newbiggin by the Sea